Breaking
by AllIWannaDo
Summary: Toph can't have a kid. She'll break it. (One-shot featuring Adult!Toph and taking place sometime between the events of Avatar and Legend of Korra.)


When the doctor informed Toph that she was pregnant, her initial reaction was fear. _I can't do this. I'll break it_, she thought. She'd take it - the kid - in her arms, trying to be gentle, and she'd drop it, or she'd crush it, and it would crumble into dust. Tragically.

Toph was strong and solid. Everything she touched, either with her hands or her bending, she broke. That was true of all earthbenders. And Toph loved being an earthbender: she loved the dirt that collected between her toes as she dug her feet into the earth, loved the vibrations in the earth that guided her movements, loved how the earth trembled under her feet at the moment when it bent to the force of her will with a _hiss _and a _crack_, sprinkling her with a fine dust that coated her body for days after. She took pride and pleasure in having the power to break earth, the sturdiest, most unrelenting of the elements.

Mothers were supposed to derive pleasure from mending, not from breaking. From nurturing. From healing. Toph had witnessed Katara nursing her son and daughter on their sickbeds, soothing their fevers with cool droplets of water. She'd witnessed her coaxing tears from their cheeks and caressing their scraped knees with bandages of water until both bleeding and pain had ceased and new skin had formed over their wounds. What could Toph do if her son or daughter sought comfort from her after a fall? Throw rocks at the kid? It would break, for sure.

The topography of Katara's hands consisted of hills, valleys, and riverbeds, not of ridges and mountain peaks. Katara's hands were smooth and soft, not rough and calloused like Toph's. Toph's hands, like her propensity for breaking, were a source of pride for her, an external manifestation of her inner toughness**. **Funny how all of her favorite parts of herself doomed her to failure as a mother.

Maybe she could stick the kid with Aang and Katara after it was born. They already had two kids and another on the way. Surely they wouldn't mind one more.

Or maybe Toph didn't have to resort to forced adoption. Maybe if - _when_, Toph corrected herself - she broke it, she could repair the damage. After all, breaking wasn't the only skill Toph had mastered as an earthbender: she could build, too. She broke the earth, then reformed it into a more solid, more powerful instrument than before. Harmless pebbles extracted from the earth became a deadly boulder under her command. If she could manage the same with a kid...well, most kids weren't made of rock or metal, but maybe, with practice, she could learn to mold hers into a competent human being.

Toph's own mother had almost broken her, not because she was too strong, but because she was too weak and frail to cope with both Toph's blindness and her bending. She was unable (unwilling?) to accept that Toph had been The Blind Bandit years before she met Aang - that her demure smile concealed a fighting spirit. Or, to put it in terms of her earthbending, that the hands capable of holding delicate china without fracturing it were also capable of moving the Earth.

In Toph's case, almost breaking had been constructive. After all, would she have mastered earthbending if her parents had not been so determined to stop her? To _break _her for her own protection? Perhaps not.

Still, if Toph had a daughter, she would encourage her strength instead of encouraging her to suppress it. And if she had no strength, she'd force her to develop some. Toph would make her kid strong, even if it meant repeated breaking and building.

Toph grinned, patting the spot on her abdomen that the doctor had identified as her kid. _I'm going to break it, definitely._

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_**A/N:**_Thanks for reading! Reviews are, as always, welcome and appreciated. Considering that this is my first of many planned ATLA fics (I usually write for the Harry Potter fandom), constructive criticism would be lovely.


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